Concerning Keats he once asked, "Have they not been trying to resuscitate him ?" When Miss Strickland wanted to send him her Lives, he broke out: "For God's sake don't, madam; I should not know where to put them or what to do with them." Scott's _Woodstock_ he picked up more than once and incontinently threw down as "trashy." As a general rule he judged a modern author by his prejudices.

If these differed by a hair's breadth from his own he damned the whole of his work.

He had to his credit a vast fund of quaint out-of-the-way reading; not to be acquainted with this was dense unpardonable ignorance: what he had not read was scarcely knowledge.

He was not what one could fairly call unread in the classical authors, for in a survey of his reviewers he compared himself complacently enough with Cervantes, Bunyan and Le Sage.

He had the utmost suspicion of literary models; to try to be like somebody else was the too popular literary precept that he held in the greatest abhorrence.
The gravity of his prescription of Wordsworth as a specific in cases of chronic insomnia is probably due rather to the thorough sincerity of his view than to any conscious subtlety of humour.